Yes I can see why The High Megas never got very far with Terry as it doesn't feel right for him as a story. I can see why Stephen could build on it though as the more you read of his work the more The High Megas fits in with his style. This is why the Long Earth doesn't feel like a Pratchett book as it is so much more a Baxter. I like both authors but there is very little crossover in storytelling style or method so I'm surprised that the book works as well as it did however I don't hold out much hope for this series being anything but a Baxter production with some Pratchett input regardless of the billing on the cover.

Hi all. I am new at this forum. My name is Slava I`m from Russia. Trully to say I read Sir Parchet book "the long earth" only recently, but I liked it very much.

I wonder if somebody is translating all of those books for Sir Parchet here in Russia? If not, I could, if yes how can I find out who it is, to join them. Anyhow it`s very interesting for me. I think "The long earth" is a very nice book that russian readers should be aware of.

Colin Smythe, Terry's agent would probably know about the translations. You can contact him by using the email address found on his website.

There is also a Terry Pratchett page linked to his website that shows the various versions of the books. I know his books (for example) are very popular in Estonia and they have their own versions of them there.

Evolution of sentience (which relates to stepping) seems to be a "Joker" probability, in the range of Earth being destroyed or the Moon never forming. It appears to have happened twice within the ~two million worlds we see (our own ancestors on the Datum and the Dino civilization). We don't know how far the avatar of FPS has travelled, so its hard to say how that factors into the odds.

Stepping and civilization seem to be two more-or-less exclusive upshots of sentience. If you can step, you don't need to settle down. In fact, as Sally notes near the end of the book, regression is likely. Fast forward a dozen generations and the stepping population is likely to be incresingly nomadic. This isn't the first time the events of the book have happened. The "phobics" are the future of civilization.

The Dino civilization, I suppose, went the same way. If any of them could step, they stepped. Those who stayed to build the temple and worship uranium were phobics, thus no evidence of them on surrounding worlds. (Except where Joshua meets Sally, we do have upright dinosaurs who appear to be sentient... Stepping cousins?)

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Stuttering and the "soft places" interest me also. We see in these instances that stepping is not merely a matter of the "subsequent term" operator. You can skip. You can perform addition. I'm from a math background and this question nagged me the entire time I read the novel: Why is the long Earth discrete?

That is, why must I go to West 1, or West 50. Why not West .5? Or West pi? Or West square root of two?

With the exceptions of Jokers, neighboring worlds seem to share similar properties. This suggests, to me, that what we are seeing are snapshots of a piecewise continuous function. So why are our steps so big? If I can jump a thousand steps at once, why can't I baby-step?

Maybe humanity formed as a singularity, yes, but maybe it formed on an extremely small sliver of worlds? And if we could get to West 0.0000001 or so, we might find other people? Themselves potentially stepping, but relegated to West 1.0000001, West 2.0000001 and so forth? The step from 1 to the integers is microscopic compared to the step from the integers to the reals (see cardinality). The Long Earth as we've been introduced to it might be a zero-dense subset of what is really out there.

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Is TPS the Silence? Or the migraines? Or both?

Who/What is manipulating the population at Happy Landings. Why? Some kind of cosmic bet?

The problem is that if Lobsang knows about stuttering and soft spots now the First Person Singular also knows about it. And it seemed smart enough to figure out how to use the knowledge to circumvent the gap. This could lead to interesting scenarios for the next book. In the first what would humanity look like if it too had to flee/migrate across worlds like the trolls? Another might be what would happen if all the people who stepped were now forced back into a single world?